


Growing While I Decay

by angeloncewas



Category: Dream SMP - Fandom, Minecraft (Video Game)
Genre: Angst, Canon Compliant, Emotional Support, Food Issues, Gen, Grief/Mourning, Insomnia, Isolation, Niki | Nihachu Needs a Hug, Niki | Nihachu-centric, Panic Attacks, Past Character Death, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Vomiting, enderchest is the best character, i even checked the timeline, im ninety-nine percent sure, kind of a happy ending?, no beta we die like wilbur, that's not funny here
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-01-26
Updated: 2021-01-26
Packaged: 2021-03-18 06:36:04
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,402
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28987917
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/angeloncewas/pseuds/angeloncewas
Summary: The constant pressures of the SMP leave its people with little time to come to terms with what's happened. They've been through several wars; they've lost lives and loved ones and it still feels like there's more to come.Niki's alright, of course. Until she isn't.-It’s fine until Tubbo’s smile slips down slightly and he leans back on his hands and says, so calmly, “I think Wilbur would’ve loved this.”
Relationships: Cara | CaptainPuffy/Niki | Nihachu, Minor or Background Relationship(s), Niki | Nihachu & Wilbur Soot
Comments: 10
Kudos: 94





	Growing While I Decay

**Author's Note:**

> Please check the tags! I don't go super in-depth, but there's heavy content throughout. Stay safe.

Niki finds it in the back of a closet.

Phil’s closet, to be exact. He’s fled L’manberg for some reason, some political agenda she hasn’t been following. Business with the cabinet, it seems; they each look worse for wear the next time she sees them. Fundy withdrawn, Ranboo shaken, Tubbo silent.

It feels rude to steal, but supplies are sparse and things are tense and she really just needs some sugar she knows he’ll have (for pastries, not potions, but on a base level it’s all the same) so she wakes up to meet the sunrise one morning and goes to enter his empty house.

There's a quiet meow at her feet as she pauses on the approaching walkway. It’s Ranboo’s cat, and Niki bends down to scoop her up.

Silver tag gleaming under the barest hint of morning light, Enderchest stares at Niki with wide amber eyes and butts at her fingers. The cat’s fur is thick and warm and the feeling makes a pang hit the center of her chest; the most expert marksman, that of her own mind.

“I have been lonely,” Niki whispers into the silence, realization jarring. Every slight twitch from the bundle in her arms reminds her of how long it's been since she’s felt another person’s warmth.

Enderchest lets out a soft chirp, seeming to blink in understanding, and Niki laughs quietly at the idea that out of all of L’manberg, it’s a pet that listens to her for once. 

She lets the cat down and gives her a tentative wave, but it makes no move towards Ranboo’s house, instead looking at her expectantly.

 _Her name suits her,_ Niki thinks, just as Enderchest takes a cautious step forward toward Phil’s front door.

Intelligent beyond the pets who’ve kept her company- _those poor foxes-_ Enderchest is just as much of a Pandora’s box of importance as her namesake. Niki steps up and opens the door, waiting for Enderchest to pass before following.

_No wonder Ranboo’s so attached to her._

Niki heads straight to the opposite side of the front wall. She knows a barrel is supposed to sit there, next to two brewing stands, and while the barrel seems intact, only one of the stands remains.

A lot of the potions materials are gone as well and it's unclear who took them. Maybe Phil remembered to, or maybe Tubbo or Fundy felt like picking the fragile fish bones of the country clean.

Regardless, there’s a small, sealed bag of sugar near the bottom, so Niki puts it in her pocket and turns to head out.

Movement wavers on the edge of her vision and Niki pauses. Phil’s closet door swings slowly back and forth with a phantom breeze, its body tucked into a back corner next to a workbench and empty storage boxes. Hangers, for both clothing and armor, sit with nothing on them but dust across a metal rod near the top.

Niki goes over to shut it out of courtesy when she notices that there’s a lump of something left behind, a brown pile of fabric almost indistinguishable from the wood paneling. Enderchest winds herself around Niki’s legs as she reaches down to grab it and it unfurls and scrapes against the floor.

The thing is much bigger than it’d looked, piled up. A mosaic of strange shades and thin material. Only upon flipping it and noticing a collar- bent and missing pieces, charred on the left side- does Niki realize what she’s holding.

The feeling rises so quick she cant stop it, saliva flooding her mouth from the sides of her cheeks. Her legs waver and she lets them, slumping to the ground as she retches.

There’s nothing in her stomach, so all that comes up is air and acid, her body shuddering from somewhere deep inside. It burns against her teeth and tongue. 

Her mind gets caught, not on what it is or who it belonged to, but the first time she took real notice of it. Her birthday party, months ago now. The hand sticking out of its sleeve holding a soul-fire cigarette.

_Blue. Blueblueblueblueblue._

Enderchest places a gentle paw on her thigh and Niki leans away as she feels her gut lurch again, bile climbing up her throat. Her nose runs and tears blur her vision, but the cat climbs into her lap and stares at her, twin suns in a dark blur of soft fur.

_Breathe._

_Blu-_

Niki shuts her eyes tight and curls her hands into fists, forcing the thought away as her shoulders shudder with gulping breaths. She’ll deal with this later, the storm in her head too big and loud to pour rain down in the middle of Phil’s house.

Gently, she puts Enderchest back down onto the floor and picks up the thing, _the trench coat,_ with one hand. She stuffs it into one of the empty boxes and shuts it with a puff of air; Enderchest’s tail swishes against her calves as she goes to carry it.

Her skin feels like it’s burning and she fights back the memories, the names and faces and voices that she’s long let sit in the back of her mind.

Locking eyes with Enderchest again, she attempts a smile that only feels pained and bitter. It stings like citrus on her chapped lips and the taste that hasn’t left her tongue.

“I’ve been _so-”_ Niki’s voice cracks and she shakes her head. Enderchest’s whiskers twitch.

Watching her feet, Niki heads carefully out the door, hands clutching tightly at the worn cardboard. Enderchest stays on the doorstep as she goes and despite the unreality of its comprehension, she gives the cat another small wave with a weak arm.

 _Thank you,_ she thinks, turning around and pushing back down anything else.

Very little separates her fingertips from the last left of her closest friend and that knowledge makes her dizzy, so she hurries back to her bakery and locks the door behind her.

Through shallow breaths, she takes the box into her back room and shuts it in her own closet.

For a second she wonders if she’s done something terrible, taking this piece of Phil’s son from him, but she makes peace with her decision in that it was abandoned on the ground.

_A heap on the ground. Blackened._

_Blueblueblue._

It’s as though she’s run for miles without noticing that the ground underneath her has dropped, a cartoonish case of tragedy for the stone walls of her home to laugh at.

Niki’s made it so far after the war without shattering, but apparently the cracks were already there, unnoticed. Pressure in a contained glass, spiderwebs across her skin. She wants to claw at it and the discomfort settling in her bones, but she stops herself.

Without a cat or any other companionship, only the silence of Niki's bakery keeps her company. She takes a drink of water from the cup on her bedside table, ignoring the disgust that curls around her body at the taste, and tucks herself into bed.

It’s morning, but Tubbo’s presidency means she’s no longer under some sort of obligation to keep her shop open and Niki’s decided she really just doesn’t feel like dealing with being awake.

* * *

Days pass while Niki ignores the ticking-time-bomb of a thing in the back of her closet.

She goes to visit Puffy, who gives her a tired smile upon arrival and talks about how both monotonous and busy it is as a knight. They don’t discuss the paper-lantern questions hanging in the air; so delicate, a breeze might set the whole thing ablaze.

Eret is Dream’s toy, Niki knows. Just as Puffy knows that Tubbo bends to the whims of his cabinet. They part with kind words and silent hopes for safety.

Tubbo’s birthday passes, then Christmas. The people seem to adore her gifts and she doesn’t recall anything but simple joy at the look in their eyes as they clutch her letters. Kindness is terrifyingly sparse in this world.

“You look very tired,” Fundy mutters to her while others exchange individual presents under the tree.

She lets herself laugh in response. “I worked for two days straight on these.”

Fundy nods and smiles and they observe the people together, Niki biting down hard on the tip of her tongue. Her body acts as her mind’s traitor; she can’t breathe in deep without Fundy noticing so she schools her expression and tries to look normal.

The darkness that lurks in her face, dips under her eyes and flattens her hair, is caused by more than some Christmas gifts. The truth is never as simple as people are willing to accept.

Sleep has become foreign in the days since her venture into Phil’s house. It ducks and weaves, a feral beast she hunts, but her poor quality weapons and lack of training keep her from catching.

In the meantime, she’s built a city.

It’s hidden underneath a flower field, small and quaint. Unlike the one that failed under L’manberg, this is for her alone.

They can’t take this from her too.

Not when the bakery makes her ill to step into. The bed in the back feels like it did months ago, in Manberg. Laying on it trying to rest when her people were at war and she was trapped. It’s all too much.

Never did she think underground would be the best place to breathe, but it’s not as though she could’ve predicted much of what’s happened.

It’s all fine, barring bursts, slips of the mind and tongue (she sees shadows in corners sometimes; sometimes they look like him), until New Years Eve.

L’manberg, or what little’s left of it, meet on the docks. They’re a small crowd, some factionless willing to set aside their unwillingness to be a part of conflicts in order to gaze at the stars together. The ambiance is relaxing, the sky is vast.

It’s fine until Tubbo’s smile slips down slightly and he leans back on his hands and says, so calmly, “I think Wilbur would’ve loved this.”

Everything seems to still, then. Fundy says something, but she doesn’t notice or hear it because a thought - the thought, the one she’s kept behind iron bars through sheer force of will - slips forward.

Unwanted, unbidden, abstract.

_It’s your fault._

Then it’s the TNT she didn’t break under the L’manberg podium ( _you were supposed to save him),_ the way she didn’t force armor on him like he did to her in Technoblade’s vault _(you did nothing),_ how she’d been more concerned about her party than him when he crashed it _(you let him die)._

Nausea grips her and she mutters something unintelligible before hurrying into her bakery and shutting the door tightly. They might call after her, she can’t tell. There’s white noise in her ears and storm clouds across her mind.

_Wilbur would’ve-_

Niki rushes as fast as she can to her sink and throws up into it, body spasming. She winces at the sting and looks away as she drains it before filling a cup with water.

It tastes like dust, scratching at her throat and not making it down to her stomach before she vomits it too.

All she can do is wait, her body jittering and her mind a scroll of _bluedeathyourfaultbluefireblue_ that pounds against the side of her skull. She feels like a prisoner in her own flesh, but even that fleeting thought is swept up in the current and she presses her hands harder against the cold porcelain.

Memories she’s forgotten creep up and grip her by the throat, but the one that catches her off guard, she hardly recognizes. It plays in third-person, as though Niki is someone else’s issue to manage and not the feeling of wanting to scream from inside her own head.

Niki had been crying in front of Puffy. Her hair still relatively short and her eyes red and welling up with tears, she’d laid her head down on the coffee table in the duck house and hiccuped out words.

_“Why do I kill everything I touch?”_

It’d been the pain of Mushroom’s loss in those words, another pet she couldn’t keep safe, but there was more to it underneath.

 _Everything_ doesn’t come from one loss, someone else’s mistake, it comes from the months and months of war that have added a permanent false bottom to every cheer she can manage, even on the days that are bright and sunny.

 _“I’ve never felt more alive than with you,”_ Puffy had replied earnestly.

She hadn’t understood.

The words had hung in the air so Niki had wiped up her tears and moved on, but the recollection had tucked itself into a vault in her mind, some cage for the pieces of herself that don’t belong to the sweet baker who lives on the water’s edge.

Of course Puffy hadn’t understood. No one had. No one could.

How could they when she was the one that did it? Who else would know death like she does?

She abandoned Mushroom, Fungi, _Wilbur._ Tubbo at the festival, L’manberg to its ghosts.

How could she let herself be friends with these people who were only going to hurt by her hands?

When her stomach has settled enough to do something other than hover over her sink, she runs the tap one last time before going to the front and locking the door. She puts a full chest of items against it for good measure. 

Niki’s bakery is an island; a single cell of her own design. She goes to bed and cries until her eyes can’t stay open anymore.

* * *

Isolation is not foreign to her, but it's hard to do much when her mind follows the same train down to some hellscape station in her subconscious every time something so much as distantly reminds her of Wilbur (she’d opened her closet to get another blanket and _the box-)._

Peace passes by in blurry days and nights of little sleep at odd hours. She busies her hands with the bakery, biting down the sickness that swarms like insects as she stares down at the pot. She watches the moon from the window and sheds silent tears to be swallowed by birdsong come morning.

It might’ve been poetic in some way if it didn’t feel like _actual_ torture.

Niki has not lost one of her three chances in this world - no sword has pierced her skin and no poison has entered her bloodstream - but this feels like a warning sign for one’s approach.

Schlatt’s dictatorship was a kinder cataclysm than that which follows her around her home.

It's unbearable.

The line between being in and out of fitful dreams is already distorted, so it’s even more disorienting when Niki wakes up one morning to a _crash_ outside her doorway.

She takes several minutes to figure out where she is and what’s going on before getting up to investigate the sound. She notices first that everything looks fine and untouched, until she scans to her left and sees that Ranboo’s standing _in a hole in her wall,_ pickaxe still in hand.

His smile is sheepish, but there’s no shame in it, just apology. “You weren’t opening your door.”

“And you decided to break in?” she asks incredulously.

“Well, I didn’t break anything. I dug in.”

Admittedly accurate, her mind is still trying to wrap itself around the fact that he has carved into her house when the reality of it shifts and slots into place. Along with it, the reality of everything.

Guilt immediately curdles in Niki’s body and she swallows back the lump in her throat.

“My door was shut for a reason.”

Ranboo falters a bit at her change in tone. “It… was locked. It’s been locked for days and you haven’t been outside.”

It’s impossible for him to know that, but he’s not wrong.

Ranboo stands awkwardly, awaiting a reaction and towering over her even mild-mannered, so Niki gestures to a chair for him to take a seat and he breathes out a sigh; presumably at not being thrown out immediately.

“I didn’t want to go out.”  
  
“Why not? What happened? Everything seemed fine last time I saw you.”

 _The docks._ Niki pauses for a second to ponder how much she’s willing to share. “I was not.”

“What _happened?”_

Niki knows Ranboo’s her friend. He has been since the day he arrived, despite getting swept up in Tommy’s actions and ending up at Tubbo’s side.

She kept him company his first night; he told her about his heritage before he stopped fearing the reactions it would bring.

So Niki tells him the story, stuttering over names and digging her nail into the pad of her thumb at the bits she only can sort-of remember. Her mind is a fierce protector and she’s grateful she doesn’t have to relive every moment, but for this it’s not helpful, having to manually pull forth the pieces that have scabbed over.

Ranboo smiles at the mention of Enderchest and frowns at discussion of Phil’s left-behind belongings, an expression that warps and stretches as she explains her reaction to Wilbur’s trench coat, left in disgrace and disarray.

“...I realized what I’d done,” Niki finishes, trying not to sound morose.

She doesn’t want to burden Ranboo with the weight she’s been handed to string across her back and huddle in for warmth, she just wants him to leave her alone. She knows he will if he’s aware of what being around her will do.

Ranboo sighs. “You can’t...”

“I can’t what?”

“You… you can’t _blame yourself._ For what he did.”

The laughter that bubbles up is hysterical, coated in sharp regret. “I can and I will.”

“But-”

“You don’t know what happened, Ranboo!”

“You’re right, I don’t,” his eyes flicker down and he plays with some grass sticking out of his pocket. “But, I do know what it’s like to… twist your own memory.”

_A uniform. Warm bread. Buttons lining the walls. Blueblueblu-_

“I’m not _twisting_ anything.”

“You think you killed Wilbur.”

_I killed Wilbur._

Sick rises quickly at the bluntness in Ranboo’s tone and Niki raises a single finger at him, a signal for just a second of silence, before getting up and ducking into the kitchen. She spits it into the sink discreetly as she can manage, running the water down and rinsing her mouth out along with it.

His eyes are wide and alarmed when she returns and she doesn’t know how much he knows, but she opts for nonchalance, ignoring the way he rifles through his bag to pull out his book.

“I don’t think that. I know it,” Niki replies hoarsely.

Ranboo doesn’t match her volume. “You don’t know anything! You didn’t do it!”

Niki pulls out the chair from the opposite end of the table and sits down. She hasn’t stayed standing for this long in ages and it's making her legs tremble slightly; Ranboo silently writes something down between glances at her and she doesn’t question it, because that wouldn’t be fair, but she hopes he hasn’t noticed.

“So I didn’t poison him myself, that makes me innocent?”

“Yes!”

“I _let it happen._ I watched him wither and die and did nothing.”

Ranboo’s expression is fierce. She’s only seen him like this a few times and never than during them has it been more clear that Ranboo is not human like she is. He looks seconds away from speaking in vrrps and clicks.

His answer, though in English, is abrupt. “What do you want?”

“What?”

“Do you want me to agree that you did it? Do you want to be put to death like Techno? Do you want us all to hate you?”

“I-”

“What does this give you, Niki? Other than self-hatred?”

Silence falls over them, the last call to some show put on for only the ceiling and the floor. Niki feels dizzy and ill. She didn’t tell him what she’s learned with the intent to fight him on it.

Her non-acceptance of his words seems to show because he gives her a look and presses on.

“I didn’t even know… him,” Ranboo says carefully. “But I know you. I think, at this point, better than you do.”

He leaves her with that and a neat little grass block he picks up from outside to put in her living room. A gesture of goodwill of sorts; she’s not super familiar with the habits of Endermen, but she’s seen the intensity at which he collects them.

Bile still sits against her teeth, jailed together in her jaw and she rests her head against the table like she did all that time ago. Her skin feels flushed underneath, but not when she touches it, and Niki’s just so tired of everything and of being tired to begin with. Her mind is still, yet the thoughts are hammering in at the edges.

She carefully maneuvers the grass block to just outside her window and sweeps up the dirt. The side of her house he mined in through is beyond what Niki can bring herself to try and fix, so she puts up a sign at the entrance with her name on it and goes back to bed.

Her hands itch to open the closet door, but even a step in that direction makes her stomach lurch and roll, so she forces herself to sleep.

* * *

Next morning (or afternoon, she’s not sure, but the sun is decently high) she stumbles out of bed to get more water only to find another visitor hovering around the hole Ranboo dug.

That’s not surprising really, the country is an investigative bunch; the surprise is that it’s _Quackity_ of all people, smile as wide as ever.

“I wasn’t sure if I should knock,” he jokes. And Niki feels exhausted, having already spent part of her morning with dread and the thoughts that stick and seep under her skin, but she waves him in and gestures to the same chair yesterday’s visitor occupied.

“What brings you here?”

“Ranboo said-”  
  
 _Of course._ “He shouldn’t have,” Niki cuts him off.  
  
Quackity’s shoulders shrug in a gesture of helplessness. “He was just trying to help.”

“I don’t need his help.”

Her response is automatic and she fills a glass from her cupboard with water, offering it to him before sipping at it herself when he shakes his head. His eyes gleam under the light that cuts through the window.

“When did you last eat?”

Niki freezes.

“...I don’t want to eat just to throw it up.”

She berates herself for the admission, but Quackity’s expression doesn’t change.

“You’ve gotta eat, man. Set a timer if you have to.”

“How did you… know?”

Of all parts of the exchange, she didn’t expect that to be the one that unsettles him, but he visibly flinches and presses a hand down flat against her table.

“I, uh, went through this. With Schlatt.”

Niki is taken aback. “Really?”

“Yeah,” Quackity admits, uncharacteristically soft. “Not quite like you, I guess. I wasn’t so sad he was gone but…”

He sighs heavily and she remembers, suddenly, through the flames of her own turmoil, that this man is a leader in his own right. Candidate, Vice President, Secretary of State. President of a different country, one he built from the ground up.

“When you lose someone,” he continues, “you wonder what else you could’ve done.”

Niki opens her mouth to protest ( _wondering?_ ), but Quackity stops her.

“I know. You think you did it. That if you’d just done something differently he would’ve lived and that makes it your fault.”

“...How?” she asks again. Niki doesn’t get it, how this much empathy could be found in someone she’s only known adjacently, and how he thinks he killed a man who died of his own hubris.

Quackity shrugs, another repeated gesture. “It’s because you loved him.”

There’s a gap, a beat of pause so hushed an arrow flying through the tension would’ve sounded like a clap of thunder, and then she’s crying.

Niki’s not sure _why_ she’s crying, especially not like this, but it doesn’t stop. It feels so different from the many days of desperation and guilt and fear raining glass shards out of her body.

Niki cries soft and broken, sobs shuddering from her lungs up and out as she falls onto her own floor and curls her knees to her chest.

He gets up and sits in front of her, cross-legged. It’d make her laugh if she could muster it, the loudest voice in most rooms, gentle in her bakery. A miniscule grin flashes across his face as he seems to realize the same thing before he goes back to solemn.

“I did love him,” Niki whispers and he nods.

“I loved Schlatt. It’s stupid and different than what you and… _y’know,_ had, but I trusted him with everything. And he gave it all up for cheap booze and losing.”

Quackity seems to analyze Niki’s responding silence as she wipes her eyes with the backs of her hands somewhat futilely. “We all knew he was an addict. Day one he was like that. Untouchable too.”

“Why did you think you… killed him… then?”

“Because I got closest. I lived with the guy for a while. I was probably the only one who could’ve saved him and the fact that I didn’t felt like a failure.” He tucks his hands into his pockets, hunching a bit. “And I was so fucked up I called it murder.”

After countless nights of back-and-forth, beating down the beasts that come to rear their head, hearing her own thoughts out of someone else’s mouth, put so simply, is strange. It makes Niki feel small, in a way, like every world-ending impact she’d shouldered was only one tiny corner of a picture she can’t even see.

“I don’t think-” she ventures, remembering the hush of the ravine and the pattern of their preparations. “I don’t think I was closest to _him.”_

Quackity’s answering smile is wry. “I think you’re letting the grief get to you. Tommy couldn’t even get him out of it and there was a point Tommy was the only one he trusted.”

_Tommy._

She’d never thought about Tommy like that, as more to the rise and fall than the abrasive right-hand to Wilbur’s measured speech.

They’d been together in Pogtopia for ages before she’d been forcibly removed from Manberg. They’d enlisted Tubbo as a spy knowing the risk.

Wilbur had trusted Tommy, had _only_ trusted Tommy. She’d been told of how a cake she’d baked for them was used as an appeal and then abandoned.

“Tommy was closest,” Niki repeats.

Quackity nods. “You didn’t kill him any more than I did.”

She’s not sure if the feeling has settled deeply enough into her to call this the break in the clouds- it might just be the eye of the storm- but she’s immeasurably grateful for the sudden tranquility that Quackity has given her and she nods carefully in response.

He gets up to leave, seeing his work done and her tentative, tired smile as a dismissal, but she gets up onto her feet too.

She’s noticed something.

“How did you know? That I didn’t want you to say his name?”

Direct sun makes him look less like the guy who plays pranks on people and croons makeshift melodies at gatherings, more like the man who stood up to Dream on the stoop of Church Prime.

Niki’s only heard the story in passing, but for all her own bravery during stability, she can’t imagine seriously challenging Dream.

Quackity looks almost as tired as she feels.

“Right after the war, hearing Schlatt’s name _burned._ I thought I’d been cursed or something.” He laughs. “Guess I was, in a way.”

Then he’s gone, nothing but an echo across her house and footsteps in the dust through Ranboo’s tunnel, which she really needs to patch up.

* * *

Niki’s hidden city is complete when L’manberg is given a time limit.

She’s already moved her important belongings, everything she knows she’d regret more than distantly miss. Though the people plan to fight, plan to follow the boy who destroyed the oldest piece of history in the world into a battle rigged for their loss, she will not work to protect something that needs to be torn apart.

At times, there are arguments about if fire is alive: willing in its evil. That seems, to Niki, like missing the point. Sometimes, wildfires are welcome. They burn down the heavy brush and clear the land for new life.

L’manberg has long been rotting, the people within it trapped by its snarls and sentiment.

Explosives drop down from the sky and Niki knows she is not innocent in the country’s persistence. It still aches when the van is destroyed, only because she knows how important it once was to someone who doesn’t get to say goodbye, and never did.

Wilbur is intertwined with the very land she stands on and this is much more of a tribute than the funeral she’d held on her own, a silent vigil for the man who brought her love and war.

Niki remembers his calloused palms and the smell of spearmint on his breath. Remembers averted eyes and the set of his jaw. Remembers a pet fox on a lead and the smell of bread in the morning.

She remembers sitting in Pogtopia, surrounded by hundreds and hundreds of individual buttons, wondering if caged animals know _how_ to be free.

Niki’s never liked the idea of having to let go to have loved; she’s always wanted to hold onto what matters, for fear it’ll fly away. As the L'manberg crater grows though, she can’t help but wonder if maybe they should've never grabbed on at all.

The flint and steel digs into her hands as she sets the L’mantree on fire, the last remaining symbol of the place that Wilbur intended to destroy, just as it had him. Ash seems to spiral toward her lungs, but no nausea hits her and the flickering flame glows hot and bright without anyone noticing.

“It was never meant to be,” Niki says aloud with a salute.

Wilbur’s last actions, his final wishes for an unfinished symphony, will finally be abided by.

No artist can replicate a revolutionary’s work enough to complete it seamlessly and Tubbo tried his best, but now, the memories can rest along with the men themselves.

(Both ex-rulers of this country that couldn’t, because as little as she cares about Schlatt, Quackity and his insistence that everyone should fight deserve some peace of mind too.)

Mourning overtakes the will to try and save what’s largely rubble and Niki takes the shift as an opportunity to slip away. The sun is setting and she stares for a second at the horizon, the thin line between what she can walk and all she will never reach.

She’ll miss the bakery, she knows. There _was_ good there, but she can’t say she feels even a teaspoon of regret toward destroying it with gifted dynamite and her own hands. It was her cage several times over and now, Niki is free.

Boxes are stacked high underground in her new home, she hasn’t figured out how to organize yet, but that’s not important.

What is, is the one she carefully labelled, putting it on a shelf so as to not lose it in the buzz and scuffle.

Niki saw Phil today. He seemed content at Technoblade’s side.

Her hands shake slightly as she opens the box and pulls out Wilbur’s coat. It’s still charred and patchy, with mismatched colors on parts of the sleeves and a main body so long she lifts it up and it still doesn’t quite hang above the ground.

Even that’s not really important, because the fact that her mind is clear is. She can hold this piece of history, this part of her friend, and breathe like the sky isn’t falling down (though it had been, just minutes ago).

Bunching up the sleeves a bit and pulling at the hem, Niki slips on the jacket. It dwarfs her, the seams slumping and collar reaching too far down, even with the parts missing. It also feels like a perfect fit.

Niki allows herself a rueful smile and shuts her eyes, listening to the hum of the wind.

_It’s over._

_I miss you._

**Author's Note:**

> Final thoughts:
> 
> \- Choose your own future. Does it follow canon, Quackity's words setting up her vendetta against Tommy, or does she truly come to terms with what's happened?  
> \- I went through something like what c!Niki did, and it was really interesting to tap back into my own feelings and try and figure out how they'd apply to this character  
> \- Sorry if it feels... abrupt? I finished it and it felt complete  
> \- Check out my Tumblr :) Same @, I watch way too many streams


End file.
